Bring Me Problems, Please

Henry Ford is famously quoted as having said, "Don't find fault, find remedy."

Of all the widely accepted bullshit business proverbs, I find this to be the most disturbing. I find it so, because it sounds smart while, in reality, teaching people at every level of your organization to ignore the problems that they don't know how to solve. If you're about to ride into battle and the person whose job it is to clean up after your horse points out that you have a  large hole in your armor, you should not only thank but generously reward that person. They may not have any idea how to fix it, but their perspective may have saved your life just the same. Your business is no different.

Because this particular maxim has always bothered me, I was delighted to hear Ben Horowitz address and debunk it in The Hard Thing About Hard Things. As Ben says...

“Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.”

In other words, sometimes you're going to ride into battle with a hole in your armor—that's life—but you're a whole lot better off knowing that it's there.

In talking to CEOs about their *most vocal* employees, I always ask the question, "Is their incessant complaining driven by a genuine desire to make things better?"

If so...

1. Are they right?
2. Why aren't you doing anything about it?

If they're right, they deserve to know why you aren't doing anything about it. It either isn't a priority or there is another reason why you don't want to act. As the former CEO of international corporation recently told me, it is pretty much only the fear of your inability to handle problems that makes you want to stop people from bringing them to your attention. To let your personal limitations continue to be the limitations of the business is the truest failure of leadership.

Personally, I want people to bring me problems. The bottom line is that the problems you don't know about are the worst ones. I am a problem solver and I am surrounded by problem solvers (most of us have a least one or two), but I can't solve problems I don't know about... and neither can you.

If you don't know how to proceed in addressing a valid concern, create a coalition of the willing. Call it an exploratory committee or a tiger team or a task force and empower your people to come up with, recommend, and even implement solutions. If you're not sure who to put in charge, well that's easy... it's whoever cares the most.